One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich By: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Work
Authority
Survival
Section One
Work kept the prisoners going from time to time. It got them through pain, and it is how they spent their days. It also could have been a form of punishment. The people, like Ivan, also used knowledge to get through their work.
"With work— that wasn’t half so bad. They gave you hot food and you had not time to start thinking. Real jail was when you were kept back from work (7).” “And now that he’d been given work to do Shukhov’s aches and pains seemed to have gone (9).” “Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash (12).” “Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness (18).” “There is nothing as bitter as this moment when you go out to the morning roll call— in the dark, in the cold, with a hungry belly, to face a whole day of work. You lose your tongue. You lose all desire to speak to anyone (23).”
The authority figures were everywhere in this prison camp. Some were looking out for the prisoners best interest, while others were looking out for their own interest. The prisoners also had to carry out the "law" according to their authority.
“No wonder the squad leader looked so worried…his job…to elbow some other squad, some bunch of suckers, into the assignment of the 104th. Of course with empty hands you got nowhere. He’s have to take a pound of salt pork to the senior official there, if not a couple of pounds (5).” “What for, citizen chief (7)?” Prisoners were not allowed to call this authority figure comrade because of their position as prisoners. The guardhouse was a punishment used by authority. “Volkovoi had put up with the reference to the criminal code but this made him wince and, like black lightning, he flashed: Ten days in the guardhouse (28).”
Everybody was looking to get by from day to day. Many, like Ivan, knew the tacts needed to survive. A major key to survival was using your knowledge every second of every day. You needed to be alerate at all times.
“Shukhov never overslept reveille. He always got up at once, for the next ninety minutes, until they assembled for work, belonged to him, not to the authorities, and any old-timer could always earn a bit…(3)” “Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The ones that don’t make it are those who lick other men’s leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies (4).” “Apart from sleep, the only time a prisoner lives for himself is ten minutes in the morning at breakfast, five minutes over dinner, and five at supper (14).” “One half he stuck into a little clean pocket he’d specially sewn under his jacket…And so, still clutching the hunk of bread, he drew his feet out of his valenki, deftly leaving inside them his foot rags and spoon, crawled barefoot up to his bunk, widened a little hole in the mattress, and there, amidst the sawdust, concealed his half-ration (21).”
Section Two
All the prisoners did was work; of course, what else would they do? They were assigned different jobs for different places, just as when Shukov and his squad reached the new camp they were assigned jobs. Once reaching the new camp work orders were given, retrieve items, carry items, shovel snow, drag cement, light the stove and fetch water. (43) Shukov was assigned to lay cement block and board up windows. His job was crucial for if the machine room did not get warmer, they would freeze. (44) Also, it was mentioned how prisoners have assembled many other places even for the use of civilians “The column passed the wood processing factory, built by prisoner labor, the workers’ settlement (the huts had been assembled by prisoners too, but the inhabitants were civilians)…” (32) It seemed as if they toiled greatly but then again they were prisoners for a reason, all except Shukov.
There were ranks of authority and each held a separate job. When leaving the first area, the jobs consisted of the following: “A second guard – a checker – stood at the next rail in silence verifying the count.” (29) “In addition a lieutenant stood, watching.” (30) “And now it was the turn of the sergeant of the escort to count.” (30) then the assistant head…. (30) The general idea of an authority figure is that they would receive more care and they have the advantage over the prisoners. Well in some cases this wasn’t so; The guards didn’t have much of a job either as they led the prisoners through the cold. They were not allowed to tie cloth around their face. (32)
The prisoners taught themselves how to survive, that was the only way. They developed techniques for themselves and they held general knowledge for survival. The following quotes and paraphrases go into further detail. “Realizing that he would have wind in his face all the way to the power station, he decided to make use of his bit of rag.” (30-31) The rag was a cloth with a long tape a t each end, the prisoners admitted that it helped a bit. (31) He clapped his hands and rubbed them together to get them somewhat warm until they would be fastened behind is back for the rest of the march (31) To prevent complaining and begging for food Shukhov stopped thinking about camp and focused his mind on something else. (32) While in prison Shukhov stopped planning for the next day or the year ahead, the guards did that for him and it seemed to make time in prison easier. (35) “In a camp a squad leader is everything, a good one will give you a second life; a bad one will put you in your coffin.” (36) “…cheat everyone in camp but your squad leader, then you’ll live.” (37) When they were outside waiting for the guards to work things out in was in the prisoners best interest to sit down, stay warm and try to keep warm. (38) It was in the best interest to save food. Shukov had a piece of bread in his pocket and he held it with a cloth so that not a crumb would fall. (40) “If you show your pride too much, he said, your lost.” “There was truth in that. Better to growl and submit. If you were stubborn they broke you.” (41) All prisoners egged each other on. Had one person failed to do their job the whole squad would fail. (48) If you wear boots you have to remember that if they’re leather they will crack and if they are valenki the felt becomes sodden and begins to steam and your feet to not get any warmer. (54) If a prisoner did not know some of these survival facts about the camps, that could determine whether or not he would survive.
Section Three
With a good work tactic, it showed, you could make it through, and it was well appreciated.
“…The squad leader had been successful in fixing the work report (68).” “A guard can’t get people to budge even in working hours, but a squad leader can tell his men to get on with the job even during the break, and they’ll do it. Because he’s the one who feeds them. And he’d never make them work for nothing (73).” “…You can’t keep the squad waiting, he understood, just because of you (74).” “Thank God for the man who does his job and keeps his mouth shut (80)!” “What a pace they set! They were driving along the fifth row now. They’d had to bend over double when they were working on the first row, but now the wall had risen shoulder-high. And why shouldn’t they race on? There were no windows or doors to allow for—just a couple of blank walls and plenty of blocks (84).” “You could count on Alyosha. Did whatever was asked of him. If everybody in the world was like that. Shukhov would have done likewise. If a man asks for help why not help him? Those Baptists had something there (85).”
Even though work was done in the harsh cold, once the men got started, its seems that many of the men forgot all about the cold that surrounded them. "He showed Senka were to hack off the ice and he hacked away at it for all he was worth with the head and blade of his pick, so that chunks of ice were flying all around and in his face too." The gang bosses helped to make the other men work to their best so they wouldnt have to stay too long after dark and would be done as quickly as possible. "The boss thought and frowned a while. 'I'll be the fourth man myself, Pavlo. And what's that about the mortar? The mixer's so big you could put six men on the job. You take the stuff out at one end while its being mixed at the other. You just see we're not held up a single minute!'... 'If you lay the bricks' he said 'I'll make the mortar, and we'll see whose the fastest! Now where's the biggest shovel around here?" (104)
The authorities took away from the prisoners.
“The cook didn’t much like carrying the sack of grits the two miles himself, so he got a helper to carry it for him—better to give the helper an extra portion at the zeks’ expense rather than burden his own back (58).” “And however much blood you sweat at work, however much you grovel on your belly, you’ll force no food out of that earth; you’ll get no more than the damned authorities give you…They rob you here, they rob you in camp, they rob you even earlier—in the warehouse (59).” “A cleverly fixed work report meant good rations for five days. Well, say four. Out of the five the authorities would wangle one for themselves by putting the whole camp onto the guaranteed minimum—the same for all, the best and the worst (69).” “And now Der took up his post behind the masons and watched them work. Shukhov hated these snoops like poison. Trying to make himself an engineer the fathead! Once he’d shown Shukhov how to lay bricks—and given him a belly laugh. A man should build a house with his own hands before he can call himself an engineer (81).”
The squad leaders were often important for keeping the men in line and keeping them working. "Beat a dog once and you only have to show it the whip. The cold was vicious, but it had nothing on the gang boss. They all went back to work." (68) The prisoners did not get a very fair treatment in the way of what they were fed, because of the cooks, the higher ups, and the assistents who were doing the jobs of the cooks becaus they were too lazy all getting the first shares on the food. "The kitchen was run by two people-the cook and a sanitary inspector. When they left in the morning, the cook got an issue of groats from the big kitchen in the camp. It worked out to about two ounces a head-about two pounds for each gang. That is, a little over twenty pounds for everybody working on the site. The cook didn't cary that stuff himself on the two mile march from the camp. He had a trusty from camp who carried it for him. He thought it was best for him to slip an extra portion of the stuff to a trusty at the expense of the prisoners' bellies rather than break his own back." (80-81)
“Shukhov was collecting another lot and turning them in, not to get extra oatmeal but to get what was coming to him quicker (60).” “He was a newcomer. He was unused to the hard life of the zeks. Though he didn’t know it, moments like this were particularly important to him, for they were transforming him from an eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment he’d been sentenced to (65).” “…He caught sight of a short length of steel—a bit of a hacksaw blade. He could conceive no immediate use for it, but then you can never tell what you might need in the future…Waste not, want not (68).” “…It’s an economy at the expense of our bellies. Well, a zek’s belly can stand anything. Scrape through today somehow and hope for tomorrow (69).”
The prisoners had to work at their hardest so that they could keep warm enough. "Shukhov and the other bricklayers didn't feel cold anymore. They were now going all out and they were hot-the way you are at the start of a job like this when you get soaking wet under your coat and jacket and both shirts." (111) Because so much food was taken from the prisoners through all of the helpers of the cooks, they had to look to scrounge anything they could whenever they could. "They stole all the way down the line-out here on the site, in the camp, and in the stores too. And you never saw these thieves doing any hard work. But it was you who sweated, and you who took what they gave you and didn't hang around the hatch. It was every man for himself." (83) Because of the long hard days that the men put in at the camps, many of the had taken up smokng it, and now needed it to some degree to cope with the harsh life of the camp, and would therefore often scrounge from whoever they could to get a smoke. "After the two bowls of mush, Shukhov wanted a smoke real bad. And figuring he could buy a couple of mugs of tobacco from the Latvian in Barracks 7 and pay back the loan later, he said quietly to the Eastonian fisherman: 'Listen Eino, lend me a litte til tommorrow-just enough for one cigarette, you know i won't gyp you." (99)
Section Four
It was seen that you must depend on everyone with in the camp for your own survival. If everyone wasn’t there before they let you out, everyone had to wait. It took time away. (93) “Odd that anyone could work so hard as to ignore the signal to knock off.” (94) If work was not finished or something had been done, a Sunday could have been taken from the prisoners for work instead of rest, that’s just what was done. (108)
“A squad leader is a power but an escort is a greater power still.” (87) Guards were already warming themselves as they moved the prisoners, they had the power to do what they pleased. “Unbutton your coats. Unbutton your jackets.” (101) The guards should always be cautious but are easily distracted. “Just then the guard heard his chief, who was in a hurry to get on, shout to the escort ‘come on…”(104)
After everyday of actual work the work continued for survival. It was point to gather firewood so that the barracks would be warmer. This time, there were only two bundles. (93) The escort held them back and the temperature was cold he called to them to go faster but the prisoners wanted to hold him back now too. To get revenge as much as you could was the only way to satisfy yourself in the camp the only way to live. (98) Also, another column threatened them, one that had been held back too. This column was now the enemy, even the enemies within their own column became friends. Survival was now making back first. (100) “Who’s the zeks main enemy? Another zek. If only they weren’t at odds with one another – ah, what a difference that’d make!” (101) The prisoners learned especially Shukov even if you had nothing to conceal always proceed with caution. “And there lay the broken hacksaw blade….without any intention of bringing it to camp.” (102)
Section Five
Ivan buys tobacco from a prisoner by doing odd jobs around the camp(121). This sets Ivan apart from the rest of the people at the camp that are mostly more educated and barely get by on their own rations. Ivan thinks that being skilled in other areas and being able to do odd things, is more of an advantage than being highly educated.
“And by his hands, big and cracked and blackened, you could see that he’d had little opportunity of doing soft jobs. But he wasn’t going to give in, oh no (119)!” “And he put the idea of getting something tasty from what Tsezar had laid out. There’s nothing worse than working your belly to no purpose (123).”
Ivan states that he does not envy Teszar because much of the parcel will go to the authorities. Everyone will want it too and most likely the best people will get cut first.
“He’d been told that this old man had spent years without number in camps and prisons, and that he hadn’t benefited from a single amnesty. Whenever one ten-year stretch had run out they shoved another onto him right away (118).” “The barracks commander was one of the biggest bastards. After all, just think, he’s locked in with us all night, but the way he acts, not afraid of anyone! On the contrary, everyone’s afraid of him. Some of us he betrays to the guards, others he wallops himself (129).”
Ivan doesn't think that Fetiukov or Captain Buinovsky will sruvive. He doesn't think Fetiukov will survive becuase all he does is steal and beg. He has nor morals or dignity. He doesn't think the captain will survive because his pride is way to high and it will get in his way to get by. So many horrible things happened in just this one day, this makes the ten years ahead look even worse.
“Fetiukov was among the first to arrive. But he soon walked off, figuring there was nothing to be scrounged that particular evening; better to wander around the mess, hunting for leftovers (if someone doesn’t finish his stew and pushes his bowl back, there are always people hustling to pounce on it, like vultures) (117).” “This was all he thought about now: we’ll survive. We’ll stuck it out, God willing, till it’s over (117).” “The right was his, that he knew, but even eight years as a convict hadn’t turned him into a jackal—and the longer he spent at the camp the stronger he made himself (123).” “He wouldn’t live to see the end of his stretch. His attitude was all wrong (125).” “No zek ever saw a clock or a watch. What use were they to him anyway? All he needs to know is: will reveille sound soon? How long to roll call? How long to dinner? To the last clanging of the rail (131)?” “…Glory be to Thee, O Lord. Another day over. Thank You I’m not spending tonight in the cells. Here it’s still bearable (134).” “Now he didn’t know either whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he longed for it. Every night he’d counted the days of his stretch—how many had passed, how many were coming (136).”
Section One – Kylee Section Two – Tara Section Three – Kylee/Nathan (I have a different version of the book that has 203 pages, so my cited page numbers will be different for when you grade it Mr. Dovico) Section Four – Tara/Evan Section Five - Nicole
By: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"With work— that wasn’t half so bad. They gave you hot food and you had not time to start thinking. Real jail was when you were kept back from work (7).”
“And now that he’d been given work to do Shukhov’s aches and pains seemed to have gone (9).”
“Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash (12).”
“Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness (18).”
“There is nothing as bitter as this moment when you go out to the morning roll call— in the dark, in the cold, with a hungry belly, to face a whole day of work. You lose your tongue. You lose all desire to speak to anyone (23).”
“No wonder the squad leader looked so worried…his job…to elbow some other squad, some bunch of suckers, into the assignment of the 104th. Of course with empty hands you got nowhere. He’s have to take a pound of salt pork to the senior official there, if not a couple of pounds (5).”
“What for, citizen chief (7)?” Prisoners were not allowed to call this authority figure comrade because of their position as prisoners.
The guardhouse was a punishment used by authority. “Volkovoi had put up with the reference to the criminal code but this made him wince and, like black lightning, he flashed: Ten days in the guardhouse (28).”
“Shukhov never overslept reveille. He always got up at once, for the next ninety minutes, until they assembled for work, belonged to him, not to the authorities, and any old-timer could always earn a bit…(3)”
“Here, men, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. The ones that don’t make it are those who lick other men’s leftovers, those who count on the doctors to pull them through, and those who squeal on their buddies (4).”
“Apart from sleep, the only time a prisoner lives for himself is ten minutes in the morning at breakfast, five minutes over dinner, and five at supper (14).”
“One half he stuck into a little clean pocket he’d specially sewn under his jacket…And so, still clutching the hunk of bread, he drew his feet out of his valenki, deftly leaving inside them his foot rags and spoon, crawled barefoot up to his bunk, widened a little hole in the mattress, and there, amidst the sawdust, concealed his half-ration (21).”
“…The squad leader had been successful in fixing the work report (68).”
“A guard can’t get people to budge even in working hours, but a squad leader can tell his men to get on with the job even during the break, and they’ll do it. Because he’s the one who feeds them. And he’d never make them work for nothing (73).”
“…You can’t keep the squad waiting, he understood, just because of you (74).”
“Thank God for the man who does his job and keeps his mouth shut (80)!”
“What a pace they set! They were driving along the fifth row now. They’d had to bend over double when they were working on the first row, but now the wall had risen shoulder-high. And why shouldn’t they race on? There were no windows or doors to allow for—just a couple of blank walls and plenty of blocks (84).”
“You could count on Alyosha. Did whatever was asked of him. If everybody in the world was like that. Shukhov would have done likewise. If a man asks for help why not help him? Those Baptists had something there (85).”
Even though work was done in the harsh cold, once the men got started, its seems that many of the men forgot all about the cold that surrounded them. "He showed Senka were to hack off the ice and he hacked away at it for all he was worth with the head and blade of his pick, so that chunks of ice were flying all around and in his face too." The gang bosses helped to make the other men work to their best so they wouldnt have to stay too long after dark and would be done as quickly as possible. "The boss thought and frowned a while. 'I'll be the fourth man myself, Pavlo. And what's that about the mortar? The mixer's so big you could put six men on the job. You take the stuff out at one end while its being mixed at the other. You just see we're not held up a single minute!'... 'If you lay the bricks' he said 'I'll make the mortar, and we'll see whose the fastest! Now where's the biggest shovel around here?" (104)
“The cook didn’t much like carrying the sack of grits the two miles himself, so he got a helper to carry it for him—better to give the helper an extra portion at the zeks’ expense rather than burden his own back (58).”
“And however much blood you sweat at work, however much you grovel on your belly, you’ll force no food out of that earth; you’ll get no more than the damned authorities give you…They rob you here, they rob you in camp, they rob you even earlier—in the warehouse (59).”
“A cleverly fixed work report meant good rations for five days. Well, say four. Out of the five the authorities would wangle one for themselves by putting the whole camp onto the guaranteed minimum—the same for all, the best and the worst (69).”
“And now Der took up his post behind the masons and watched them work. Shukhov hated these snoops like poison. Trying to make himself an engineer the fathead! Once he’d shown Shukhov how to lay bricks—and given him a belly laugh. A man should build a house with his own hands before he can call himself an engineer (81).”
The squad leaders were often important for keeping the men in line and keeping them working. "Beat a dog once and you only have to show it the whip. The cold was vicious, but it had nothing on the gang boss. They all went back to work." (68) The prisoners did not get a very fair treatment in the way of what they were fed, because of the cooks, the higher ups, and the assistents who were doing the jobs of the cooks becaus they were too lazy all getting the first shares on the food. "The kitchen was run by two people-the cook and a sanitary inspector. When they left in the morning, the cook got an issue of groats from the big kitchen in the camp. It worked out to about two ounces a head-about two pounds for each gang. That is, a little over twenty pounds for everybody working on the site. The cook didn't cary that stuff himself on the two mile march from the camp. He had a trusty from camp who carried it for him. He thought it was best for him to slip an extra portion of the stuff to a trusty at the expense of the prisoners' bellies rather than break his own back." (80-81)
“He was a newcomer. He was unused to the hard life of the zeks. Though he didn’t know it, moments like this were particularly important to him, for they were transforming him from an eager, confident naval officer with a ringing voice into an inert, though wary, zek. And only in that inertness lay the chance of surviving the twenty-five years of imprisonment he’d been sentenced to (65).”
“…He caught sight of a short length of steel—a bit of a hacksaw blade. He could conceive no immediate use for it, but then you can never tell what you might need in the future…Waste not, want not (68).”
“…It’s an economy at the expense of our bellies. Well, a zek’s belly can stand anything. Scrape through today somehow and hope for tomorrow (69).”
The prisoners had to work at their hardest so that they could keep warm enough. "Shukhov and the other bricklayers didn't feel cold anymore. They were now going all out and they were hot-the way you are at the start of a job like this when you get soaking wet under your coat and jacket and both shirts." (111) Because so much food was taken from the prisoners through all of the helpers of the cooks, they had to look to scrounge anything they could whenever they could. "They stole all the way down the line-out here on the site, in the camp, and in the stores too. And you never saw these thieves doing any hard work. But it was you who sweated, and you who took what they gave you and didn't hang around the hatch. It was every man for himself." (83) Because of the long hard days that the men put in at the camps, many of the had taken up smokng it, and now needed it to some degree to cope with the harsh life of the camp, and would therefore often scrounge from whoever they could to get a smoke. "After the two bowls of mush, Shukhov wanted a smoke real bad. And figuring he could buy a couple of mugs of tobacco from the Latvian in Barracks 7 and pay back the loan later, he said quietly to the Eastonian fisherman: 'Listen Eino, lend me a litte til tommorrow-just enough for one cigarette, you know i won't gyp you." (99)
“And by his hands, big and cracked and blackened, you could see that he’d had little opportunity of doing soft jobs. But he wasn’t going to give in, oh no (119)!”
“And he put the idea of getting something tasty from what Tsezar had laid out. There’s nothing worse than working your belly to no purpose (123).”
“He’d been told that this old man had spent years without number in camps and prisons, and that he hadn’t benefited from a single amnesty. Whenever one ten-year stretch had run out they shoved another onto him right away (118).”
“The barracks commander was one of the biggest bastards. After all, just think, he’s locked in with us all night, but the way he acts, not afraid of anyone! On the contrary, everyone’s afraid of him. Some of us he betrays to the guards, others he wallops himself (129).”
“Fetiukov was among the first to arrive. But he soon walked off, figuring there was nothing to be scrounged that particular evening; better to wander around the mess, hunting for leftovers (if someone doesn’t finish his stew and pushes his bowl back, there are always people hustling to pounce on it, like vultures) (117).”
“This was all he thought about now: we’ll survive. We’ll stuck it out, God willing, till it’s over (117).”
“The right was his, that he knew, but even eight years as a convict hadn’t turned him into a jackal—and the longer he spent at the camp the stronger he made himself (123).”
“He wouldn’t live to see the end of his stretch. His attitude was all wrong (125).”
“No zek ever saw a clock or a watch. What use were they to him anyway? All he needs to know is: will reveille sound soon? How long to roll call? How long to dinner? To the last clanging of the rail (131)?”
“…Glory be to Thee, O Lord. Another day over. Thank You I’m not spending tonight in the cells. Here it’s still bearable (134).”
“Now he didn’t know either whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he longed for it. Every night he’d counted the days of his stretch—how many had passed, how many were coming (136).”
Section One – Kylee
Section Two – Tara
Section Three – Kylee/Nathan (I have a different version of the book that has 203 pages, so my cited page numbers will be different for when you grade it Mr. Dovico)
Section Four – Tara/Evan
Section Five - Nicole